When we started with Cobbers in 1968, pa systems had no place in folk music and people were expected to sit quietly and listen to the music. What changed was that folk clubs moved into the pubs and no amount of people yelling "SHUT UP" could quell the noise as the night went on. We were possibly the first to take a pa into a club and half the audience walked out in protest. It was a whole 60 watts!
As people got used to the idea, it opened new venues to folk musiciand and we would find us playing the unis along with the rock bands. The only time I can remember that people complained about the volume was at a big dance we played regularly. We had a pretty big system which we kept hidden behind an enormous Australian flag. During the week we would have maintenance days and one week, we painted the big system as the rest of the week we were only playing at schools and we used to just tale our foldback system and use that as a small p.a. So what happened? Saturday night, we turned up at the union hall for the dance, opened the trailer and all we saw was the foldback. We had forgotten to reload the other boxes. It was too late to go back and we had 800 dancers on the way, so we just put the foldbacks behind the flags and pushed it as far as we could. Like I said, that was the only time people complained about the volume, because it isn't about volume at all, it's about the quality of the sound equipment and the skill of the person in control. I hate big festivals because there are so few sound people who know what an accoustic instrument should sound like.